Starbucks to close 8,000 stores for racial sensitivity training
Afternoon sessions announced amid backlash over the arrest of two Black men at U.S. store
Starbucks will close more PHILADELPHIA— than 8,000 U.S. stores for an afternoon next month to train employees after two Black men were arrested while waiting at one of the coffee chain’s Philadelphia locations last week.
The “racial bias education” training will occur on May 29 and be provided to nearly175,000 employees in the U.S., the company said in a statement Tuesday.
It is unclear whether or not the more than 14,000 Canadian employees from the approximately 1,400 Starbucks locations across Canada will receive similar training.
“This is the right thing to do in the U.S. and we are finalizing plans for the right thing to do in Canada to ensure all our stores are inclusive and welcoming, every time,” Starbucks spokesperson Tim Gallant said in an email to the Star. A Black Lives Matter activist confronts a Starbucks employee in the U.S. store where two Black men were arrested.
A disgruntled Twitter user said: “I’m gonna need to see some concrete action over and way above this standardized ‘fill in the blanks’ internet apology before I ever even think about stepping foot in a @StarbucksCanada ever again.”
The announcement follows days of protests and a personal apology by the company’s CEO, Kevin Johnson, to the Philadelphia men in a private meeting Monday, a company spokesperson confirmed to the Washington Post.
Johnson, who rushed from Seattle to Philadelphia over the weekend as the backlash erupted, also met with Philadelphia’s mayor and police commissioner.
He has publicly apologized for what he called “reprehensible” circumstances that led to the arrest of the two men at a store in Philadelphia’s Center City district last Thursday.
“I will fix this,” Johnson said in a video message.
Separately, he said that the video was “very hard to watch,” and told Good Morning America on Monday that “what happened to those two gentlemen was wrong.” He said the company was reviewing the actions of the store manager who had called police.
“My responsibility is to look not only to that individual but look more broadly at the circumstances that set that up just to ensure that never happens again,” Johnson said Monday.
Starbucks said later that the manager “is no longer at that store.”
The Starbucks at the corner of 18th and Spruce had closed temporarily because of demonstrations inside and outside, but reopened Tuesday morning to little commotion: no protesters were outside and the customers in line had little interest in talking about what had happened there in recent days.
It was business as usual inside the store, with its neat displays of chicken BLT protein boxes and sparkling mimosa gourmet gummies.
But just one day earlier, demonstrators convened at the same location. One person in the crowd hoisted a sign that read, “Is she fired or nah?” — a reference to the store manager who called police. Others chanted, “Anti-Blackness anywhere is anti-Blackness everywhere.”
Rosalind Brewer, the company’s chief operating officer, talked about the company’s call for unconscious bias training for store managers in an interview with NPR and called the incident a “teachable moment for all of us.”
She said that as an African American executive with a 23-year-old son, she found the cellphone videos taken of the incident painful to watch. “It would be easy for us to say that this was a one-employee situation, but I have to tell you, it’s time for us to, myself included, take personal responsibility here and do the best that we can to make sure we do everything we can,” Brewer told NPR on Monday.
At least two cellphone videos captured the tense moment when at least six Philadelphia police officers stood over two seated Black men, asking them to leave. One officer said that the men were not complying and were being arrested for trespassing. “Why would they be asked to leave?” Andrew Yaffe asks on a video. He argues with one of the police officers, calling the arrests "ridiculous."
Yaffe runs a real estate development firm and said he wanted to discuss business opportunities with the two men.
The two unidentified men were taken out in handcuffs soon after. They were held for nearly nine hours before being released, said criminal defence attorney Lauren Wimmer, who represented the men over the weekend when they potentially faced charges.
“My responsibility is to . . . ensure that never happens again.” KEVIN JOHNSON STARBUCKS CEO